The Country Girls was my first novel and by far the easiest one to write. True, there was a welter of emotion to be countenanced, but I was happy to be doing it and became lost to the outside world. It had been commissioned by my great supporter Iain Hamilton of Hutchinson and he, in conjunction with Blanche Knopf, paid me a £50 advance, which, true to my profligate nature, I presently spent.

I had read voraciously, loved and sought to learn from writers as disparate as Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, the Brontës, Flora Thompson, Chekhov, Gogol, Flaubert, Mary Webb, Constance Holme, Colette and Nadine Gordimer. But it was from Ernest Hemingway that I learnt the lesson of pruning my prose. Like many fledgling writers, I believed that the merest brush with a published author would somehow crown my garbled efforts. I had moved to London with my husband and children, and when I read that Arthur Michener, an American professor, was giving a talk in a university, I went, to meet the spirit of Hemingway, so to speak. It was an astonishment, a virtual leap, as Michener read the first flawless lines of A Farewell to Arms, with such mastery of narrative, imagery and feeling, the prerequisites for great prose.

The Country Girls took three weeks, or maybe less, to write. After I brought my sons Carlo and Sasha to the local school in Morden, I came home, sat by the windowsill of their bedroom and wrote and wrote. It was as if I was merely a medium for the words to flow. The emotional crux hinged on Ireland, the country I had left and wanted to leave, but now grieved for, with an inexplicable sorrow.

Images of roads and ditches and bog and bog lake assailed me, as did the voice of my mother, tender or chastising, and even her cough when she lay down at night. In the fields outside, the lonely plaint of cattle, dogs barking and, as I believed, ghosts. All the people I had encountered kept re-emerging with a vividness: Hickey our workman, whom I loved; my father, whom I feared; knackers; publicans; a travelling salesman by the name of Sacco, who sold spectacles and sets of dentures; and the tinkers who rapped on the door demanding money in exchange for mending tin pots. There was the embryo poet, an amateur historian and the blacksmith who claimed to have met the film director John Ford on the streets of Galway and was asked to appear in The Quiet Man, but declined out of filial duty. The lost landscape of childhood.

There was no library in the local town and hence no books. One copy of Rebecca had reached us and pages were passed from one woman to the next, though alas not consecutively. Men did not read. Men broke in horses and drove cattle to the fairs and sometimes got drunk and pugilistic.

Where do words come from, I wondered. I still wonder. Because even without books or rather with only prayer books and bloodstock manuals in our house, I had conceived a love of words and assembled my own little crop of them. I believed they had magical associations and that something amazing could be done with them. I had, of course, the language of the Gospels, which to me seemed and seems perfect, and the marvelling narratives of Irish myths and fables. I learnt everything through Irish, except English itself, and I loved both tongues.

Before I knew what it meant to be a writer, I had resolved on that path. It was a way out of County Clare. What I did not know was that the homeland was the font from which to draw stories and drama. I now realise that if I had grown up in a city I would not have had such a legacy. That landscape with its beauty and its hardships, its harvests and its hungers was central to my thinking and sensibility.

When I sat down to write the book I did not have to search for a title. It spoke itself - The Country Girls. Kate the obedient one, the incurable romantic, and Baba, her alter ego, determined to smash the conventions and defy the strictures of church, priests, nuns and parenthood. I was in a sense both of those girls, though I kept the rebellious side of my nature a secret. My crime, however, did catch up with me.

The novel, published in 1960, caused a bit of consternation. People were outraged. The few copies purchased in Limerick were burnt after the rosary, one evening in the parish grounds, at the request of the priest. I received anonymous letters, all malicious. Then it was banned; nameless gentlemen who sat in some office in Dublin added it to that robust list of novels which were banned in Ireland at that time. Unbeknownst to me, a heated correspondence passed between Archbishop McQuaid of the Dublin diocese, Charles Haughey, then a minister, and the Archbishop of Westminster Cathedral, all deeming it filth, a book which should not be allowed in any decent home. My poor mother was ashamed and had her own private battle with me. She erased with black ink any of the offending words, and the book was put in a bolster case and placed in an outhouse. So much for the glories of publication!

In the big world the reactions were a little chauvinist. Frank O'Connor, in the New York Times, concluded that I had appalling taste in men, and LP Hartley, on English television, dismissed it, deeming Baba and Kate a pair of nymphomaniacs. All this a foretaste of judgments to come. I had not at that time read Lord Byron's maxim that a man should calculate on his powers of resistance before entering on a career of writing. I have since read it and must add that a woman embarking on a career of writing needs those powers one hundredfold.